Today, she wrote a blog post summing up that experience, “Speaking my mind,” which includes a video that records her last attempt to get a visa from an immigration office located in the Vedado district of Havana.

I read her blog not only because I’m trying re-learn Spanish more than 30 years after I last studied the language and it’s helpful to switch between the English and Spanish versions of her posts. I read it because of her sharp eye for detail and highly compressed prose style, which she uses to raise the humble blog-post to the level of high art. She can make a 300-word post say more than some people can say in a 100,000-word book. Above all, I read it for inspiration.

Here’s an English-language profile of her, broadcast yesterday on CNN: